The Secret of Annexe 3

The visit to the post office produced little information that was not already known. Tom Bowman had worked on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday following Christmas Day, and then had taken a week's holiday. He should have been back at work that very day, the 6th; but as yet no one had seen or heard anything of him. It seemed he was a quiet, punctual, methodical sort of fellow, who had been working there for six years now. No one knew his wife Margaret very well, though it was common knowledge that she had a job in Oxford and took quite a bit of trouble over her clothes and her personal appearance. There were two handwritten letters from Bowman in the personnel file: one dating back to his first application to join the PO; the second concerning itself with his options under the PO pension provisions. Clearly there had been little or no calligraphic variance in Bowman's penmanship over the years, and here seemed further evidence - if any were required - that the letter Margaret Bowman had produced from her handbag that morning was genuinely in her husband's hand. Mr Jeacock, the co-operative and neatly competent postmaster, could tell them little more; but, yes, he was perfectly happy for one of Bowman's colleagues to follow the police officers down into Oxford to look at the unidentified body.

'Let's hope to God it's not Tom!' he said as Morse and Lewis got up and left his small office.

‘I honestly don't think you need to worry about that, sir,' said

Morse.

As always, the cars coming up in the immediate rear had all decelerated to the statutory speed limit; and by the time the police car reached the dual carriageway just after Blenheim Palace, with Mr Frederick Norris, sorter of Her Majesty's mail in Chipping Norton, immediately behind, there was an enormous tailback of vehicles. Morse, who had told Lewis to take things quietly, sat silent throughout the return journey, and Lewis too held his peace. At the bottom of the Woodstock Road he turned right into a narrow road at the Radcliffe Infirmary and stopped on an 'Ambulances Only' parking lot outside the mortuary to which the body found in the Haworth annexe had now been transferred. Norris got out of the car that pulled up behind them.

'You coming, sir?' asked Lewis.

But Morse shook his head.

Fred Norris stood stock-still for a few seconds, and then -somewhat to Lewis's bewilderment - nodded slowly, his own pallor only a degree less ghastly than the skin that backed the livid bruising of the murdered man's features. No words were spoken; but as the mortuary attendant replaced the white sheet, Lewis put a kindly, understanding hand on Norris's shoulder, and then gently urged him out of the grim building into the bright January air.

An ambulance had pulled in just ahead of the police car, and Lewis, as he stood fixing a time with Norris for an official statement, saw the ambulance driver unhurriedly get out and speak to one of the porters at the Accident entrance. From the general lack of urgency, Lewis gathered that the man was probably delivering some fussy octogenarian for her weekly dose of physiotherapy. But the back doors were suddenly opened to reveal the body of a woman covered in a red blanket, with only the shoeless stockinged feet protruding. Lewis's throat was dry as he walked past the police car, and saw Morse (the latter still unaware of the dramatic news that Lewis was about to impart) point to the back of the ambulance.

'Who is she?' asked Lewis as the two ambulance men prepared to fix the runners for the stretcher.

'Are you ...?' The driver jerked his thumb towards the police car.

'Chief Inspector Morse - him! Not me!'

'Accident. They found her—’

‘How old?'

The man shrugged. 'Forty?' 'You know who she is?'

The man shook his head. 'No one knows yet. No purse. No handbag.'

Lewis drew back the blanket and looked at the woman's face, his heart pounding in anticipatory dread - for such an eventuality, as he well knew, was exactly what Morse had feared.

But the ambulance driver was right in suggesting that no one knew who she was: Lewis didn't know, either. For the dead woman in the back of the ambulance was certainly not Mrs Margaret Bowman.